"Upon my honour, there's nothing I should like so much as to get away across the seas! And you might as well hint to my lord, in the course of your letter, that I should be very well contented with a berth in the Colonies. A good climate, of course! One wouldn't care to be shipped off to Sierra Leone!"
"I will write that to Uncle Val, willingly. But—don't ask me to beg money of him again."
Algernon made a rapid calculation in his mind, and answered without appreciable pause, "Well, Cassy, it shall be as you will. But as to begging——that, I think, is scarcely the word between us and Lord Seely."
"I'll run upstairs and bathe my eyes, and I shall still have time to write before dinner," said Castalia, and left the room.
When he was alone, Algernon opened the writing-table drawer, and glanced at the papers in it. Castalia's hurried manner of concealing them had suggested to his mind the suspicion that she might have been writing secretly to her uncle. He found no letter addressed to Lord Seely, but he did find an unfinished fragment of writing addressed to himself. It consisted of a few incoherent phrases of despondency and reproach—the expression of confidence betrayed and affection unrequited. There was a word or two in it about the writer's weariness of life and desire to quit it.
Castalia had written many such fragments of late; sometimes as a mere outlet for suppressed feeling, sometimes under the impression that she really could not long support an existence uncheered by sympathy or counsel, embittered by jealousy, and chilled by neglect. She had written such fragments, and then torn them up in many a lonely hour, but she had never thought of complaining of Algernon to Lord Seely. She would complain of him to no human being. But all Algernon's insight into his wife's character did not enable him to feel sure of this. Indeed, he had often said to himself that no rational being could be expected to follow the vagaries of Castalia's sickly fancies and impracticable temper. He would not have been surprised to find her pouring out a long string of lamentations about her lot to Lord Seely. He was not much surprised at what he did find her to have written, although the state of feeling it displayed seemed to him as unreasonable and unaccountable as ever. He gave himself no account of the motive which made him take the fragment of writing, fold it, and place it carefully inside a little pocket-book which he carried.
"I wonder," he thought to himself, "if Castalia is likely to die!"
CHAPTER IX.
The letter to Lord Seely was duly written, and this time in Castalia's own words. Algernon refused to assist her in the composition of it, saying, in answer to her appeals, "No, no, Cassy; I shall make no suggestion whatsoever. I don't choose to expose myself to any more grandiloquence from your uncle about letters being 'written by your hand, but not dictated by your head.' I wonder at my lord talking such high-flown stuff. But pomposity is his master weakness."